Hokkaido is actually to the north of Honshu. But that takes up too much space, so I moved it, just 'cuz I can. You can see the hole where it used to be.

Back during the Shogunate, the samurai government got really desparate for money. One of the things they thought of was to divide the main island in to East and West, block all the roads, and charge people a boatload of money to cross. Rather than raking in the cash, people just stopped travelling across the line.

Kanto means "east of the line" and is a catch-all word for anything in Eastern Japan. -ben is a suffix meaning "dialect." This includes Tokyo predominantly but the north is also considered kanto. The major cities in the kanto region all have their own dialects, but people tend to lump them all together as "east of the line." Textbook classroom Japanese, what the government calls hyoujungo or "standard language", is kanto-ben. It's the official language of business and government, and therefore just about everyone in Japan can pull off a passable version of kanto-ben if absolutely necessary, although with difficulty. Listening to a character from another region struggle to speak kanto-ben in a formal setting is a very common sort of "inside joke" in anime and manga which is totally lost in translation.

Kanto-ben emphasizes the consonants of the language more than the vowels, and tends to be more brisk, monotone, and clipped than kansai-ben.

 

Kansai means "west of the line." You'll see by the big red blob, this is primarily the major cities of Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, and Nagoya, but each of these cities claims to have its own dialect as well. People just lump anything west of here as kansai-ben.

Kansai residents claim to be more laid back and good-natured than kanto people. I've heard countless Osaka residents claim Tokyo people have no sense of humor, and Tokyo folk who claim Osaka folk are slackers. It's said that the stereotypical vertical Japanese society is more relaxed in kansai than in kanto, but people disagree on this point across The Line.

Kansai-ben emphasizes the vowels of the language more than the consonants. It tends to be slower, wider, and more nasally than kanto-ben. English voice dubbing will usually replace a kansai character with someone with a Southern drawl, but this doesn't really work, because kansai is a major metropolitan area. It doesn't have the rural "hick" feel that a southern drawl has.

 

The problem with defining tokyo-ben is that it's the capital city, and therefore what's spoken in Tokyo is supposedly the standard "national" language. Unless they've grown up in downtown Tokyo, (the little red spot to the left), Japanese people will usually say that Tokyo doesn't have a dialect of its own, because it's all "standard Japanese."

For formal, polite speaking, this is true. Polite tokyo-ben is what you learn in Japanese class. For informal speaking, nothing could be farther from the truth. Informal Tokyo Metropolitan dialect is fast, clipped, and often slurred. Great emphasis is placed on the consonants over the vowels. R's are often emphasized and rolled similar to Spanish or Italian. Men almost universally change words that end in ai or oi to ee for emphasis. (urusai -> 'rrusee for "shut up.") It has a feeling of brisk, tough, no-nonsense street talk. Male lead characters in manga and anime are almost universally tokyo-ben.

The ai to ee change is partially responsible for the American anime crowd overusing the sentence-final particle ne. Any word that ends in nai often becomes nee in tokyo-ben. This isn't ne, but a very rough form of nai, which has the opposite effect of the sentence softener ne. "Shut the hell up, I am NOT!" (Urusai, sou ja nai! -> 'rrusee, sou ja nee!)

Ask anyone outside of Tokyo though, and they'll claim this is all universal Japanese. Anyone can understand it, and most people can pull off a decent imitation, but it's not as widely used, and not as "authentic" outside the capital.

 

Osaka-ben is the second most common dialect that can be attached to a single city. Tokyo-ben and osaka-ben are probably the two most widely heard dialects, and there's almost a sort of rivalry between them. They're also the most different.

Osaka is the second largest city in Japan, and was the biggest until the Shogunate artificially grew Tokyo/Edo by moving the capital out of nearby Kyoto. In my opinion, it seems a lot of them are still rather bitter about the whole thing too.

Osaka-ben grammar is very different than standard Japanese. The easiest way to identify it is the way it changes desu or da to yanen or ya. If you hear a lot of ya's or yanen's at the end of sentences, it's osaka-ben. Polite verbs ending in -masen become -mahen, -san often becomes -han, chigau becomes chau, and thousands of other changes that people not born in Osaka could probably never truly master. Some words are shortened, some grammar structures are changed, omitted, or added. iru/imasu becomes oru/orimasu. Personal pronouns change, name suffixes are changed, really it's almost like an entirely different language.

Osaka-ben is synonymous with comedians and entertainers, and almost every comedy act or stand-up comedian in Japan will speak in Osaka-ben. Without it, it's like trying to watch British humor without the British accent. It just doesn't work. Comedy is Osaka, and the comic relief character in anime or manga will almost always talk in Osaka-ben. To people outside of the city, it just sounds funny. I've also been told that a lot of women find it sort of sexy.

The Osaka dialect shares a lot of the properties of kansai in general. It's slower, more nasally, and emphasizes the vowels over the consonants. Most people who labelled the recordings "kansai" were actually hearing osaka-ben, so it sets the standard for the whole region.

Please don't try to imitate osaka-ben if you are not from Osaka, unless you are very good at the language. You will sound like an idiot. You can't simply change da to ya and say "hey, I'm speaking osaka-ben!" If you really want to learn, there are several books you can start with, but use them with care.

 

Touhoku isn't a city, but the vast rural area north of Tokyo containing the major cities of Sendai and Aomori. People not from the area will claim it's all kanto-ben, but it's really not.

Touhoku is not nearly as populated as central Honshu, and as you go farther and farther north it gets pretty sparse. You start to hear more jokes about empty space and cows as you mention places up towards the tip. Because of this, touhoku-ben is occasionally the brunt of jokes claiming its somewhat "hick"-ish. It's not really, (well maybe the far northern tip is,) but its an easy joke for people from the major cities.

Characters that are supposed to be from very rural areas, who don't know cities well, will often speak in touhoku-ben, although usually only when they get angry or upset, and lose their grasp on standard kanto-ben. In actuality, Sendai and Aomori are pretty big cities, and really can't be labelled as "country bumpkin."

Touhoku-ben is very close to standard kanto and it's hard to pick up the differences unless you know the language very well.

 

Chubu is the region surrounding and centered on Nagano, where the winter Olympics were held a few years back.

It falls technically into the kanto region but no one there would really categorize themselves as kanto. This is not a very famous dialect, but you can tell from the red blob in the center that the Nagano people feel it's very strong and unique.

I don't know what comprises chubu-ben, which means it can't be as strongly unique as, say, Osaka. In fact, I didn't even know there was a chubu-ben until I found these poll graphics. But apparently there's something different there.

 

Nagoya-ben unfortunately doesn't exist much anymore. (Although Nagoya residents would kill me for saying it.) It used to be a very strongly unique dialect, but a lot of people thought it sounded ugly and it was brutally made fun of by the mass media. As a result, outside of Nagoya proper you're not going to hear it very much.

It falls basically right on the line between kanto and kansai and shares similarities with both.

 

Of course, it's impossible to hear the name Hiroshima without thinking of the atomic bomb. Yes, the city was destroyed, 150,000+ died, but it was a relatively tiny bomb that was dropped, and the area became livable again very quickly. Today it is a major urban center and port city.

Hiroshima-ben starts to sort of fade out from kansai and shares more with the dialects of the Shikoku and Kyushu islands. This means the word choice and grammar structures begin to change. In my travels to Hiroshima, I didn't hear a great deal that could be categorized as "unique" to Hiroshima, but this is probably because people heard me speaking tokyo-ben and adjusted so we could understand each other. However, if you look at the map, there's obviously something.

People from the southern tip of Honshu and the southern islands do talk very differently, and it's easy to identify, but it's hard to give concrete examples of how it changes.

 

Kyushu and Shikoku have their own unique dialects. I've only included one of the pictures here because the other is easy to predict. Just imagine the other island is colored red instead.

I'm out of my expertise here. Never been to Kyushu or Shikoku. I know the dialect is very different, because I have trouble understanding native Shikoku or Kyushu folk when they're talking amongst themselves. It is relatively unknown by the rest of Japan and seldom used on television or the mass media.

Kanto and kansai only refer to the eastern and western halves of the main island. Kyushu and Shikoku fall outside of this. They're their own thing, although I'm not quite sure what that thing is.